The idea of middle class has received notable scholarly attention in recent times. Most contributions tend to focus on the political functions of that idea in the making of bourgeois order after the crisis of Ancien Régime institutions, and/or in the mobilization of political support to counterweight the tide of lower-class radicalism. Less attention has been paid, however, to the uses of the idea of middle class in the making of international order in the era of Europe's imperial expansion. This article seeks to explore those two different (but interconnected) uses of the idea of middle class in France -"internal" and "external"- and to argue that both played a fundamental role in the social and geographical imagination that shaped bourgeois society. In the first part, representations of society in liberal quarters -from Diderot to Guizot- are explored, while the second part analyses the uses of the idea of middle class in conceptualizations of the non-Western "other" -Russia in particular- from Montesquieu to Guizot